The Day

What the day is

This entry marks February 3, the date of the 1959 plane crash in Iowa that killed the musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. Richardson, known as the Big Bopper, along with the pilot, Roger Peterson. The record's stored name is a truncation of the phrase the day the music died.

Origin and background

The circumstances were ordinary and avoidable. The three were touring the upper Midwest in winter on a punishing schedule, traveling between venues in unheated buses that kept breaking down. Holly chartered a small plane after a show in Clear Lake, Iowa, mainly so the band could reach the next town early enough to do laundry and rest. Seats were given up and swapped in the hours before the flight, which is why accounts dwell on who was nearly aboard.

The aircraft took off shortly after midnight into deteriorating weather and came down in a field minutes later. The pilot was young and not qualified for instrument-only conditions, and the investigation pointed to spatial disorientation in darkness and snow, a well-understood hazard in which a pilot without visual reference loses track of which way is up.

Holly was twenty-two. Valens was seventeen and had been recording for months rather than years. Richardson was twenty-eight.

The phrase attached to the date comes from Don McLean's 1971 song American Pie, which uses the crash as the opening of a much longer meditation on the following decade. The line entered general use so completely that the event is now usually known by it.

How to take part

• Listen to the actual recordings rather than the song about them. Holly's catalogue is startlingly inventive and very short.
• Listen to Valens, whose reworking of a Mexican folk song is still the better-known version.
• Read about the touring conditions, which are the real cause behind the cause.
• Notice how much of later rock traces directly to a body of work made in eighteen months.